If you’re a developer or work in IT, you’ve likely heard of Docker. It’s a 3 year old open source technology that has grown exponentially during its existence. And now, it’s beginning to turn heads in even the most regulated industries. First let’s explore what Docker actually is for those that are unfamiliar. “Docker is an open platform for developers and sysadmins to build, ship, and run distributed applications,” according to the Docker website. The technology consists of two tools, the Docker Engine and the Docker Hub. The Docker Engine is a, “portable, lightweight runtime and packaging tool,” while Docker Hub is a, “cloud service for sharing applications and automating workflows.” The technology is particularly appealing for developers because it is now easier than ever to make sure you develop, test and deploy using the same environment as your colleagues, resulting in less issues caused by differences or missing libraries. Docker also offers developers the flexibility to quickly run their apps anywhere, whether its on laptops, VMs or QA servers. More simply put, “Docker helps developers build and ship higher-quality applications, faster.” Sysadmins are finding the technology useful as well, because of the ability to standardize development environments among other reasons. “Docker helps sysadmins deploy and run any app on any infrastructure, quickly and reliably.” Docker seems to be on the same disruption path as GitHUB, which shook the source control systems, or more lately, how composer “revolutionized” the way we deploy components of a PHP and Symfony application. On the business side, the benefits may be huge. By simplifying the way we deploy apps and creating more manageable...

I have seen this one too many times with friends, families organizations over and over again. It’s happened to me in the past before, having a portable drive storing all my important document, photos and a whole heap of other files and thinking it would never happen to me. Then one day it crashes. I received a call today from a frantic friend who had just lost a chuck of important business emails for the last 6 months. Why? because they had gotten a new laptop and using Microsoft Outlook kept all their emails stored locally on their laptop, so while trying to export from the old and import to the new an option “overwrite existing data” was accidentally left ticked while they were mindlessly talking on the phone. Investigated for what was 3 hours using various methods in an attempt to restore the lost emails, it eventually came to a point where he had to cut his losses and accept that 6 months of his business emails were… gone. I told him this as i tell you now it is important to probably devise a plan on how you can backup your data so that in the event of losing your storage device, floods, theft you will still have access to your data. DO NOT keep your family photos, important documents, assignments in a USB or portable hard drive. The best method to always keep a backup and a method that i use are one of 2 ways. 1. Use a cloud based backup service 2. invest in a NAS (Network Attached Storage) My samsung galaxy S3 automatically...